This is the second and final part of my write-up of PAX East 2018. In part 1 - Thursday and Friday - I mentioned how I got a chance to have a casual chat with the creative director of the Elder Scrolls: Legends and try the demo of The Elder Scrolls Online: Summerset, and talk about the other non-ES-related things I saw there.

The third day of PAX East was mostly Bethesda-focused for those of us from the UESP. It was the last day that most of us had badges for, though most of our day would be spent at the Bethesda Gameplay Day event, which was being held next door to the convention center. Be sure to check out our interview with Matt Firor and Rich Lambert that we conducted at this event; you can read it here.

Two days into PAX East 2018! Several of us from the UESP are here for the weekend, and more are showing up for the Bethesda event on Saturday! I figured I’d summarize my experience in case anyone was interested and wants to know what it’s like to attend an event like that (I personally always bugged wiki admin Jeancey for info in the past.)

Before I get into that: FYI to those attending, Bethesda/ZOS don’t have a booth, but you can try out Summerset in the PS4 area: download the Experience Playstation app and reserve a time (sign-ups start at 9am each day).So here’s a summary of everything I did in my first two days of PAX: I got to talk to a Legends dev, try out Summerset, and see plenty of non-ES stuff….

As I wait to be embarrassed by my previous prediction that the next Elder Scrolls game will be revealed on a very specific date, I'm going to raise the stakes on my previous guess by claiming I have successfully guessed what the three most recent Elder Scrolls games would be. How so? Through sheer good luck. About a year ago, I wrote a blog post talking about the troubled status of the spin off games of the series, how they could be lost to time if something wasn't done to preserve them. And as a final comment, I said that if the games had to be sold, sell them through GOG. And almost a year to the day, here is Battlespire and Redguard on GOG. Also Morrowind, but that has never stopped being available. So I successfully requested Battlespire and Redguard at such a time that I can slyly smirk and try to take credit for them coming back out, while they were certainly already working on re-releasing them.

But I'm going to take this one step further, and say that I also guessed that the next game would be Elder Scrolls: Legends. With our April Fools joke. You may notice that I state that this game would be available on iOS, and sure enough, Legends is set to be available on the iPad. The rest of the details remain hazy, and not much else has been said since the reveal, but I am going to say that the game will heavily feature the finer details of mudcrab reproduction at the very least. That could also mean that the April Fools jokes we release are being used by Bethesda for ideas, and that idea is simply terrifying.

So those aren't exactly the strongest justifications for claiming credit for predicting the next games, I know. But I am going to say that is odd enough to allow me to take some credit here. In fact, all of the credit. Good job, me.

I feel like Bethesda has personally challenged us. Dave Humphrey, our owner, founder, and all around cool guy, mentioned that some developers at Zenimax jokingly said to him that they were worried we might be able to announce the game ahead of them, and what the game would be about. All we'd have to do is check to see what pages they visit on our site, and we'd be able to make a very educated guess. As it turns out, we just didn't think of trying to do that, although we definitely should set up a system for this, now that it's been pointed out to us by the developers that we should be able to do this. We'll see about getting a system that allows us to tell what the developers are looking up in advance, for the benefit of everyone.

I don't want access to this information so we can spoil the announcement, mind you. I want this information for the developer's sake. If we see that they're studiously looking up, say, information about relations between the Bosmer and Khajiit, then we can quietly make updating information relating to those topics a priority. It'd be a silent and sneaky way to help the dev team out. We'd also benefit of course, beyond the simple joy of being able to call it well in advance. We'd be able to improve areas of the site that will get more traffic, well in advance to the need. So the developers get better information, the players get a more complete resource on launch day, and we'd be rushing less during an announcement. Everyone's a winner!

So when is the next game coming out, then? To answer that, it's November 9th, 2017. My reasoning for that, after the break.